Film Categories: Urban

  • S Division

    Toronto 2012. Sotheby’s International Realty, a division of Sotheby’s Art Auction House, promotes a lakeside condo development using Impressionist-and-Surrealist-derived imagery. The ads on hoarding, billboards, and other media are often sexist and delve into the absurd: for instance, a ballet dancer doing a tour jeté underwater amongst a school of fish. And it becomes apparent the developers considered only young white childless couples as potential clients—no humans of any other type. “An unwelcome side effect of the Avant-garde’s success was its appropriation by the “art of advertising .” For the Avant-garde could no longer be distinguished from the Avant-garde of…

  • Phonetic Philmmaking

    For as long as I can remember, it has been difficult and uncomfortable to express myself when speaking aloud or when writing. I would often silence myself to avoid the feeling that I was making a mistake, a word out of place or mispronounced, to avoid the embarrassment of repeating and having to clarify my thoughts. I have always lived with the disruption of language intertwined with my experience of living with a learning disability. “Phonetic Philmmaking,” a 20 minute experimental Super 8 film, satirizes normative language conventions and transforms them into a new visual vernacular linking metaphorical and literal…

  • Fluss

    A journey down the Danube River is transformed into a dream space of half-seen images and flickering shorelines. Though at times abstract, the river remains certain, always moving towards the sea. Filmed in black and white 16mm and hand-processed, Fluss is a companion to River (2023), a study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by Ottawa’s Lightproof Film Collective.

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.

  • Gan Tang, The Lake

    In the summer of 2023, the government of Jiujiang launched the Gan Tang Lake Cleansing Project. Within weeks, this ancient lake with over two millennia of history was drained. Nearby in Gan Tang Park, a boy wakes up in the rain. There, the destiny of Gan Tang awaits.

  • The City And

    On a bleak day in midwinter, a girl travels to her city’s bus station to meet someone. She travels familiar streets and moves confidently. Her relationship with her city changes when no one arrives on the expected bus. She wanders out of the bus station, noticing her city in a new way.

  • In the Alcove, at the Place

    For “In the Alcove, at the Place” Davis went back to the alcove (a private place in her room) and the place (the four corners of an intersection in Toronto, consisting of a house, two grocery stories, and a coin wash) every couple of weeks for nine months. In her alcove she filmed herself sitting in a chair; at the place she filmed aspects of its everyday life, making discoveries about it and becoming friendly with some of its inhabitants. In both alcove and place, there is change but also repetition. Among other things, the film concerns her growing familiarity…

  • Making a Scene

    Offers passersby the opportunity to don a mask and become either an elephant or a mosquito. A look at people’s inhibitions.

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…